I am a philosophy PhD candidate at the University of British Columbia, where I work with Evan Thompson. I am also a philosophy instructor at Camosun College, located in Victoria, Canada.
My general research interest lies in defending the enduring relevance of the phenomenological tradition established by Edmund Husserl and further developed by Maurice Merleau-Ponty to contemporary philosophy of mind. Moreover, I am interested in Husserlian phenomenology’s efforts to provide a philosophically rigorous theoretical foundation for explaining the relation between consciousness and nature, formulating the problem of consciousness, and rethinking the meaning of naturalism.
More specifically, my doctoral research centers around the phenomenology of well-being, flow states (states of ego-boundary dissolution and absorbed attention in the context of effortless and spontaneous action), and autotelic experience (experience that is intrinsically rewarding). My dissertation gives a phenomenological account of the structure of autotelic experience. It focuses on explicating the crucial roles played by altered self-experience, time-consciousness and norm-consciousness in constituting autotelic experience, particularly as exemplified in flow states. My overarching goal is to provide a phenomenological account of the structure of autotelic states that explicates how they contribute to well-being and self-cultivation.
In my work, I bring the resources of phenomenology to bear on specific problems left unsolved in philosophy of mind and 4E (embodied, embedded, extended, enactive) cognitive science. I do this by showing how supplementing empirical, psychological accounts of cognition with a phenomenological approach brings greater clarity and precision to our understanding of how pre-reflective, bodily experience of time’s passage in makes possible self-experience, our sense of being agents in the world, and our responsiveness to norms.
My research at the Master’s and Doctoral levels has been funded by SSHRC (the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada).